


Bubblegum

by SegaBarrett



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 19:34:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4150182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of snapshots in the lives of Claire and Deirdre Howell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bubblegum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GreenPhoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenPhoenix/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Oz, and I make no money from this. 
> 
> Warnings: Rape mentions (mainly canon), but nothing explicit.

“Listen, Dee-Dee, you had better shut the fuck up and let me finish telling you this story.”

Tiny Deirdre Howell looked up with a little half-smile at her mother. 

“Okay, Mommy. And then what happened?” 

Her hands were wrapped tight around her baby doll, as if she was part of the audience for yet another tale of Oz. At six, Deirdre grasped that this Oz was not quite the same one that Dorothy came from, but still expected the yellow brick road to come up at some point.

“Well, they had to shut the whole damn place down. Somebody mailed in a damn thing of fuckin’ anthrax – that’s a poison, you get it?” Claire made a motion with her finger across her neck. “And took out the whole mailroom.”

“Did anybody die?” Deidre asked, wide-eyed, holding her doll close.

“Yeah, honey, but only bad people.”

“I don’t like it when people die,” Deidre spoke up. “Not even bad people.” 

“Yeah well, kid, you need to toughen up, because people die in this world all the time,” Claire began, but looking at her daughter, she sighed. “I love that you care about everybody, kid, trust me, I do. But you gotta be careful. That’s one thing I learned in Oz.”

She’d known it long before Oz, of course. In fact, she’d probably taught the toughest cons in Oz a thing or two. But she wasn’t about to tell her innocent child that. She definitely wasn’t about to tell her that her conception was most likely the result of her raping some dude or another. She was all about being open with her kid, but some things needed to stay under lock and key just to keep some semblance of sanity going.

“But weren’t there any nice people in Oz?” Deirdre asked, and Claire thought back over it all, all the people she had met there, all the dark and empty eyes.

“I don’t really know, honey. Being a guard it’s… it’s different. You don’t really get to know the people there.”

She had gotten to know many of them very, very well. She could still remember the way Ryan O’Reily had felt against her, the roughness of him, the way he’d dug his fingernails into her flesh like she could give him something he was looking for.

They were all looking for something though, weren’t they?

“But you saw them all the time. Weren’t they like… your friends? Like my friends at school?”

Claire laughed, low and surprised.

“Honey, if that’s the way you behave with your friends at school… Then we’re gonna need a talk sooner rather than later.”

***

Deirdre didn’t always understand the things that came out of her mother’s mouth. It was like she was always laughing to herself, but no one else knew what was funny.  
Her friends at school were afraid of her, and some of them weren’t allowed to play with Dee-Dee. Not where other people could see, at least.

They all wanted to be around her, otherwise. Because she told them things they couldn’t grasp, but couldn’t stay away from. Hell, she had the best stories of anyone on the playground.

She made her way over to where a group of girls were playing double-dutch.

“Cinderella, dressed in yella, went upstairs to kiss a fella, by mistake she kissed a snake, how many doctors will it take? One, two…”

As soon as Deirdre appeared, the girl jumping rope stumbled and fell.

“Weirdo!” she yelled, pointing her finger, “Dee-Dee’s a weirdo!”

Deirdre lifted her middle finger and waved it in the air.

***

Claire Howell hadn’t had a boyfriend since Deirdre was born. Well, it had been longer than that. Maybe she had never had a “boyfriend”, ever. She’d had men who had taken advantage of her, and they had been followed by men she had taken advantage of. Life was a power struggle. She’d yet to meet a man she would actually want to just be around, sitting and watching reality TV or eating dinner with.

There were people who actually did that kind of thing willingly?

Her mother seemed to think so, at the very least. Kept asking Claire when she was going to “settle down” with someone. 

“It’s your own fault, being in that prison for that many years. Gave you a skewed idea of what life is supposed to be. My, sometimes I think you aren’t even much better than all those people you locked up. One night stands with Latino men? Claire, when you were a child you had sense. What happened to that?”

Claire wondered how her mother would feel if Claire told her that her mother’s boyfriend had happened to her, when she was around seventeen. 

But she figured she wouldn’t really want to hear that. 

Instead she pulled her face into as much of a smile as she could muster and said, “Yeah, I guess I’ll keep lookin’, huh Ma. Let me know if you find any winners out there.”

“I hate it when you’re so damn sarcastic, Claire. What the hell did anyone ever do to you?”

***

Dee-Dee was eleven the first time a bunch of girls tried to jump her. She was leaving school, walking along and thinking about what she’d do as soon as she got home. She’d go on the internet and read some more about exciting things, far-away places, far from hick towns like this one most of all. 

Even the tales of Oz, of all the dark things that had gone on there, made her more excited about getting out into the world. After all, in Oz there were real life Bonnie and Clydes, weren’t there? Actual Hannibal Lecters – her mother had mentioned a guy like that, who had eaten his parents, though Claire hadn’t been at the prison when he had – and exciting, terrifying people like that.

Dee-Dee was ready for an exciting, terrifying life and she was more sure of that than anything else in the world. The worst thing she could be was boring. If she looked back when she was older and her life had been dull, had been predictable… she would kill herself. She knew it.

“Hey bitch!” one of the girls called. They were larger than her, some with braided hair and some with short bobs, all with snarls and dark eyes. Like they were sizing her up. They looked like something out of Jaws, something floating in the water.

“Who are you talking to?” Dee-Dee asked, her hands on her hips, jutting her head out. She wanted to provoke them. She wanted, no needed, to reel them in.

“Talking to you, ugly face!” One of them yelled. A fist flew through the air, but it was slow motion.

It was also slow motion when she knocked each of them out, one after the other.

***

The first time Claire Howell bailed her daughter out of jail, Deirdre was sixteen years old. She’d been part of instigating some sort of fight in front of a bar.

“Why was Dee-Dee at a bar?” Claire’s mother had asked, and Claire had rolled her eyes.

But she knew. She knew that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. 

She yanked her out of the front door of the county jail by the ear, screaming at her.

“What the hell did you think you were doing? You want to end up in Oz? You wanna end up in Oz?”

Dee-Dee looked up at her with icy eyes, glaring.

Yeah, she thought to herself. Yes, she would.

***

On the day she turned eighteen, Deirdre Howell drove out to Oz. It wasn’t Oz anymore; it hadn’t been in eighteen years. It was an abandoned hole in the ground.

“This is where I was made,” she mused aloud, kicking over some dirt and pacing back and forth. “What does that say about me?”

“It says that you’re tough,” Claire told her. Her hand was wrapped around her daughter’s. “It says that you don’t ever stop fighting.”

“I don’t know how I imagined it,” Deirdre admitted. “It seemed… It seemed like it would come alive, the way you would tell it. Maybe if we were inside.”

“The place is falling down. It’s condemned. I don’t even know how much of it is still there…”

But Dee-Dee turned her head to the side and looked up at her mother.

“Since when have you ever followed the rules?”

Claire removed the bolt-cutters from her pocket, and stepped forward.

“Well,” she said, “Let the time travel begin.”

Deirdre smiled.

“I want to see it all.”

“You’ll see everything,” she promised, stepping forward. She’d keep this promise, at least. This most important one.


End file.
